


Something Luminous at Night

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, Early Days, F/M, Family, Fluff and Angst, Insomnia, Past Relationship(s), Reading, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 08:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13829952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: “She hasn’t been sleeping well. Except that’s not exactly true. She hasn’t been sleeping well here. She hasn’t been sleeping well with him.”





	Something Luminous at Night

**Author's Note:**

> Well. It’s the end of another month, so I guess here is another Thing. This is set mid–Season 5, post–“Significant Others,” (5 x 10) but pre–“Recoil” (5 x 13) 

 

“Read something luminous at night” 

— Edmund Wilson

* * *

 

She hasn’t been sleeping well. Except that’s not exactly true. She hasn’t been sleeping well _here_. She hasn’t been sleeping well with him, and even if that’s not quite an every night thing, the truth of it is . . . shocking. It’s shocking _because_ it’s shocking. 

She’s always been grin-and-bear-it about sharing a bed. From the time the question first presented itself, it’s always been something she’s found easier to just go ahead and do, rather  than explain why she’d rather not. But really, she’d rather not. 

She’d rather not deal with someone else’s space in the dead of night. With the dozen awkward questions that present themselves with someone else in hers. About toothbrushes. Pajamas on or off. Left side or right or doesn’t matter (how could it not _matter?_ ) and on and on and on. 

She’s never loved sharing a bed until now. Until him, and she almost wishes this—another staring, wide-awake night—were something old. She almost wishes it were reversion to type or some to-be-expected loss of magic seven months on, but it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels . . . 

“Cruel and unusual,” she mutters as she slips finally from the bed. As she retreats from the warmth of his body to shiver in the unwelcoming black of the bedroom at large. 

She points her toes toward the bathroom. She scurries as silently as she can in that direction, but she knows it’s hopeless before the second footfall. 

The bathroom is strictly a first line of defense. The shock of real cold works—has worked—on a rare, certain kind of night. Tile and porcelain and water from an onyx tumbler sliding down her throat like silver have once in a while been enough to quiet something that’s no better than force of habit. It’s been enough to drive her back under the covers and send her burrowing beneath one heavy arm and into the strong circle of the other as her spine arches to fit itself against him. As the soles of her feet tuck themselves between his calves. 

The bathroom does that sometimes, or it used to when every once in a while she’d find herself  needing a moment to reset her too-busy brain. It worked before Meredith. 

It’s stupid. _She’s_ stupid, because it’s been weeks already, and they’re past it. He was dumb—astoundingly dumb—and he knows it. She was . . . less than direct, and she knows that. 

And Meredith was Meredith. They’ve both got a _much_ clearer idea of exactly what that means,  and they’re past it. Over it. Beyond.

Except she hasn’t been sleeping well. Here. With him, and it’s cruel and unusual. 

She gives up right on the bathroom threshold. With her fingers hooked around cold tile just inside the door, she curses the metaphor and gives up. She pivots on the ball of one foot. She hunches her shoulders and scowls across the black of the bedroom, right into the inviting picture she’s not a part of. The warm-looking rumple of him and down and light-weight wool. She peers at the reach of his strong, habitually gentle fingers spread wide to span the hollowed-out place in her pillow, like he’s missing her despite the even rise–fall of his ribs in solid sleep. 

She sighs. Collapses in on herself and drags her feet toward the office. 

It’ll have to be a book, she decides. It’s that kind of night, and it’s another thing. Another lousy, stupid thing. 

 _A book._ It shouldn’t be a crisis. 

She loves to read in the middle of the night. And it’s not when she can’t sleep, necessarily. It’s when she’s not ready to sleep, most times. It’s when she’s dragged home later than late and she’s just too wired to fall right into bed. It’s when he’s coaxed her back to the loft after a case—in the middle of a case, or when there’s no case at all—and he’s puttering around doing whatever he does before he’s _finally_ ready to turn in. 

And even when she can’t sleep, it shouldn’t be a fucking crisis. 

She loves reading _here_. His books. The things he loves and the things he’s written. The books about her and the books that aren’t. She loves running a fingertip along one neat row of spines or another with the city’s dead-of-night glow bleeding in through the glass wall of his office. She loves sprawling in one of his leather chairs, sinful, soft, and wide, until she feels drowsy. 

_Read something luminous at night._

She doesn’t know where the quote comes from. Him. By way of him, almost certainly, and even tonight—even on the _n_ th night of her not sleeping well—it seems like sound advice. She listens to her beyond-exhausted body—to her tumbling, whirring mind—and she knows it is, but it’s another stupid way that Meredith lingers. 

A parting shot, and Kate knows she has no one but herself to blame for it, because she asked. Sixty seconds from escape, and she just had to ask. 

_Why didn’t it work out?_

And Meredith answered, guileless or so it seemed. So it seems on nights like this. 

_He knew everything about me . . . Enough to fill a million novels._

And there it is. A stupid, eleventh-hour question that’s stolen her peace of mind. Stolen her pleasure in a million little things, and she’s angry about it for the first time. Angrier by the minute when she realizes that she’s been afraid. That she’s been holding her breath and letting her insides tie themselves in knots for _weeks._ She hasn’t been sleeping well with the luxury of him curled around her, and it’s because of fucking _Meredith._

“Kate. You’re up.” 

He looms on the threshold with the black of the bedroom square and infinite behind him. He hangs on to the book case with curled fingers. He lingers, less than half awake and unsure of things. Uncomfortable, and it seems almost impossible he’s responsible for the same blissful picture she’s exiled herself from so recently. The same warm-looking rumple she misses deep in the heart of her. 

“It’s late?” She squares herself to him, blinking. Uncertain and worse, because she doesn’t know what to do with this. With anger so recently unearthed. “I woke you.” 

It sounds strange. Formal and peculiarly ugly, but he tries to laugh it off. He steps toward her. He covers the copper-washed distance in little more than a stride. 

“I wish.” 

He says it lightly. Playfully as he takes something from her hand. He tries to, but she snatches her hands behind her body. She learns about it in the moment, this thing she hadn’t realized has he was holding. 

“I wish,” he says again, when it turns out she won’t give it up. Lower this time. Darker and more . . . Something. 

_Evasive_

That’s the word that hisses through her mind, and she whirls away from him. She hunches her shoulders and curves her whole self around it. A notebook. A hard-sided notebook with a hand-written label. 

 _Nikki_  

“It’s nothing.” 

It’s an answer to a question she hasn’t asked, and he’d very much like it to sound casual. He keeps his hands to himself, but he’d very much like her to forget about it. To surrender. 

“Can’t sleep,” she says shortly. She drops into a chair and almost laughs at the way his face falls. Almost, except she feels mean. Feels powerful in a nasty, steely kind of way, and still she goes on. “Nothing’s good.” 

“It’s really not.” Misery creeps into his voice. Into his posture.  “It’s lousy nothing. Stupid.” 

“It’s Nikki.” She holds it up. “We’re offended.” 

“It’s not Nikki.” He shuffles toward her, agitated and looming. “It’s all . . . not Nikki. All the things that didn’t work. All the things I got wrong.” 

He drops hard on to the arm of the chair, his slumped spine toward her, and with his face hiding from dead-of-night glow, she has to look. It’s some kind of strange literary crisis born of him and and Meredith and another damned middle of another damned night, and she has to look, even though he winces as he hears the elastic band around the cover snap back. Even though he peers at her under his own arm, with his elbows resting heavy on his thighs.  

There’s not much there. Her thumb riffles the edge of the pages, and it’s the God’s honest truth. It’s a thick, expensive, hard-covered thing, and there’s not much there at all and she wants to laugh again. For real this time. She wants to laugh and pull him into the chair with her. She wants to let him talk her right back into bed, because it’s all ridiculous. Fucking Meredith. It’s all so stupid, but the book falls  open then.

It’s not her riffling thumb or the balance point of something well made. It’s a crease. A definite break in the spine not that far in, and there’s hardly anything there. A blank reverse and hardly anything on the facing page, even though his hands have clearly stopped here often and stayed a while. 

 _Sister_ , it says in definite caps at the top of the page. It’s centered. Underscored with a definite colon and then nothing. Not quite nothing. A few words dashed off and crossed out, casually, then more emphatically. 

But _Brother_ is the next real thing. All the way at the left margin and a question mark to follow. A light, uncertain stroke, even though it’s ink. It makes her want to check, so she does. She riffles back and forth, her eyes working at crime-scene speed. It’s all ink, and she knew it would be. She lets the book fall back open. She lets the emptiness of the page speak to her. To him.  

“The niece.” She looks up at him, mean again. Mean still, but it’s something more like wickedness this time. Something _beyond_ that’s infinitely more pleasant. “The disappearing niece.” 

“The fucking niece.” He shifts a hip so he’s half facing her on the arm of the chair. He looks crestfallen, and it’s a little manufactured. He’s hamming it up, but she sees the real aggravation underneath. The real self reproach. “I just wanted the movie in there. Just to give her a lighter shade, and Alexis would only see it with _me_ the one time, and I thought . . .”  The artifice falls away. He looks generally miserable, and she doesn’t follow until he adds, “I forgot. I actually picked up the phone to see if you’d . . .” 

The math does itself in her head. It lands square on the memory of crying her heart out alone in a dark theater at the beautiful little love story. Square on the memory of missing him, though she’d have died before admitting it back then. 

“She didn’t need a beard,” she blurts. She sounds defensive. Annoyed. “She saw it . . . she saw it alone anyway.” 

“I know.” He nods at the book in her lap. At the not-quite-blank page. He makes a careful gesture to a scratch out on the more furious side. “And she doesn’t—there’s no sister. There’s no brother and no good friend with a precocious little genius who calls her Aunt Nikki. There’s no fucking _niece._ ”

“Is it . . .” She’s laughing now. Almost laughing, but she catches herself. She presses her lips together, because she knows the answer before she even asks. “Is it important?” 

“Of course it’s important,” he snaps. His spine is straight now. He’s all right angles. “She’s _alone_. She’s been alone in every way that counts since that night, and it’s . . .” His fist closes and uncloses. He looks down at his palm like the words might be there “. . . it’s a relief. She doesn’t have to share or deal with anyone else’s version of it, and she thinks that’s . . . She tells herself she never even wanted one. Someone to boss around or look up to. She talks herself into this version . . .” 

“Did you?” She cuts in sharply. It’s half anger at least. It’s half that she’s had just about enough sudden-onset psychoanalysis, and it’s half not that at all. “Did you ever want one? More than one?” 

His face goes blank. He blinks down at a her, genuinely astonished by the question. By its suddenness and, no doubt, its ferocity.  

“I—guess?” He stumbles over it. Over the question mark. “I mean. Kids do. Everyone does, right?” 

“I’m not not asking about everyone.” She snaps the book shut. She shoves it defiantly to the far side of her body away from him. “I’m asking if _you_ ever wanted . . .”

“I might,” he mumbles. 

He looks down at his thighs and for a white-hot minute, she’s pissed. She’s _furious_ at the side-stepping. That Meredith was fucking right, but he goes on. 

“Have them, I mean. Half. Step. Whatever.” 

His eyes flick up to just catch hers. A fleeting moment of contact, but enough to up end her. To up-end everything she’s thinking. Everything she’s _been_ thinking, because she knows that look, guarded, but eager. Running, but not. She _knows_ it, and it’s like a wave breaking over the two of them. 

“Your dad,” she says and hates the taste of the word on her tongue. “Your father,” she tries, and it’s not really any better. 

“Yeah.” He tries out a smile, but it’s pretty miserable. “Him. I could have . . . a hundred, and I wouldn’t know.” 

She doesn’t know what to say. Except that’s not exactly true. She doesn’t what she _should_ say. If she should ask if he’s looked. If he’s ever wanted to look or wants to right now. She doesn’t know if she should remind him that she finds people for a living. That if he wants to know—

“I’ve never”—he clears his throat—“never said that out loud.” 

“But you wondered?” 

She’s somewhere between asking and telling. She’s reaching up and pulling him down into the wide seat with her, and it’s such a role reversal. Such an up-ending of things, the way he hesitates, then gives in. 

“At some point.” He tips his head back against the leather and closes his eyes. “I think I must’ve fantasized as a kid. Wanted a brother or whatever. But one day, the idea was just there. That they might be scattered to the four corners of the globe. Or they might live right here. _He_ might live right here in the city with a family.” His eyebrows lift. “A _normal_ family.” 

“You’re not really qualified for that.” 

It slips out. It’s a terrible thing, and it just slips out after everything. All the fucking drama she’s unleashed in the middle of the night, but he laughs. He rolls his head toward her and she feels it shake his whole body, from his toes on up. 

“And my mother _really_ isn’t.”  

“That sucks,” she says after a quiet while. “That really sucks.” 

“It did.” He shrugs as he says it. He wriggles further down into the chair. Further down into the curl of her arm around his shoulders. “Sometimes it did, but not a lot.” His mouth twists as the correction comes to him. An edit on the fly. “Not often, really.” 

“Really,” she echoes, and it’s not a question. He knows and she knows it’s not a question, and they’re quiet again. 

“Think you can sleep?”

It’s later when he asks. Some time later, given the violet creeping into the light through the glass. The copper retreating. 

“Not yet.” She shakes her head. Smiles at the ticklish sweep of his hair across her chin. “You go, though.” 

“Abandon you?” He sounds affronted, or means to. The yawn spoils the effect. It swallows up the _Never_ he tries to add. 

“Go,” she says. She pulls her feet up and drums on his thigh. “I’m just gonna read a little.” 

“Read?” He gives her an over-the-top suspicious look. Makes a half-joking swipe for the notebook still tucked in beside her. “Not that?” 

“Not that.” 

She fishes it out from between the cushion and the arm. She hands it over, a curiously solemn act. He takes it from her, a flash of surprise behind his eyes. A flash of something like relief, but he slides it right back where she’d found it. He squares it with the others, right there in plain sight, now that’s she’s looked, and isn't that just a metaphor.

“Something else,” he says grandly. “I could read to you.” He half turns. He flicks her a ludicrous, smoldering look, and damn if it doesn’t send a shiver chasing right over her skin. He could _read to her._ “Something luminous at night.” 

“That,” she says. She _demands,_ stretching languorously. Sprawling. “Definitely that.” 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The quotation is on a bench outside of a beautiful downtown branch of the Chicago Public Library. 
> 
> If some of the details are mysterious—in Heat Wave, Castle gives Nikki a never-again-mentioned niece whom she intends to use as a beard to go see Disney's Up. That movie was released right after their Season 1 estrangement—a factoid I've been obsessed enough to write about before: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1817653


End file.
